Photos taken during Mumford and Sons' concert at Portsmouth Pavilion during their Sigh No More Tour (August 9th, 2012).
2021 Update: I can’t believe this was nearly a decade ago. Cold Weather Company wouldn’t be a thought for another year and a half. At the time, I was in my first band, The Gentleman Finn (formerly known as the Gentlemen of Jersey Folk). It’s not hard to see where the inspiration for such a name came from, considering Mumford and Sons was my favorite band at the time, and their touring company is famously known as “The Gentlemen of the Road”. To be honest, I’m not sure if the inspiration was direct when we first named the band, but this isn’t a post about us anyway. It seems nearly inevitable, though, that my own story would interweave with a band that affected me so much at such a formative time.
This particular show felt more like a pilgrimage—I had bought the tickets months in advance, and my sister and I traveled across three states to see these guys play. I had recently gotten my first DSLR camera (a Nikon D5100), and I was determined to be able to photograph the show. This was long before I was privy to press passes and camera restrictions, so I can’t thank the kind woman at the check-in counter enough for feeling too bad to confiscate it (thanks, visible anxiety!). The show blew our minds, and the city of Portsmouth, VA (the Commodore Theater, especially, where we ate dinner and watched the Dark Knight Rises for a total of $24) was pretty darn cool too.
Might as well make this post extra extra long, I suppose. Flash forward to 2015, when Cold Weather Company was invited to play the afterparty for the Gentlemen of the Road stopover show in Seaside Park, NJ. When we got to meet some of the Mumford fellas after our set, I just wished I could reach through time and smile at the version of myself who stood in the crowd clearing fog off his lens for the whole show, hoping to one day be on both sides of the lens.